Design Knowledge Base

Teach the AI from your finished designs. Adding a design as an example records the species palette and guild pairings for its climate & goals, and Generate will favour what's worked before. Any plant not yet in your database is validated against the authoritative USDA PLANTS database (confirms the species is real and correctly named, and its growth form); growing details USDA doesn't publish (zones, spread, toxicity) are flagged for your review. Confident matches are added and synced to your Airtable; unsure ones wait for review.

Customise the map key

Tick what to show, click a swatch to recolour (plant roles and map layers recolour on the map too — the key never shows a colour the map doesn't draw), and edit any label or the reference text beside it. Lidar terrain colours come from USGS and stay as served. Everything saves with this project and prints in the report's design key.

Section / Elevation

A section-elevation sheet: the cut you choose (A–A), titled by the way it looks, plants on the line drawn heavy and plants behind it fading with distance, real ground with a datum, numbered tags with a plant schedule. It redraws live; the cut marker with its view arrows shows on the map while this window is open. Concept drawing — not survey-accurate.

Import Site Data

Detect from Aerial Imagery

Colour-segments the current satellite view into canopy, structures and paved surfaces, then adds them as editable polygons. This is a heuristic first pass — always review and correct. Pan/zoom so the parcel fills the view, and use the Satellite basemap.

＋ Add plants to database

Design Check — Toxicity

Final review of every planted species carrying a toxicity rating. Nothing is changed automatically — review each and swap in a non-toxic alternative with one click if you choose.

Design versions

Named snapshots of the whole design — a safety net beyond undo that survives reload. Save one before big experiments (regenerating, bulk edits, client revisions). Restoring is itself undoable.

Resource footprint

Every external call this project makes — AI plans, climate/soil/elevation lookups, geocoding — is tracked here with an estimate of the energy and water it used, and what the local-first cache and efficiency router avoided. Figures are order-of-magnitude estimates, not audits.

The router learns from you: deleting, swapping, or regenerating auto-planted elements counts against the route that produced them. Routes that make designs you keep get used more, so resource use falls over time without sacrificing quality. Your edits always win — nothing is ever locked.

Water — catchment & budget

Harvest = area × rainfall × runoff coefficient (1 mm on 1 m² = 1 L). Numbers update live as you draw or edit catchments. Concept-level, from public climate and ~30 m elevation data — not engineered stormwater design.

Keyboard shortcuts

Click a key, then press the new one. Backspace unbinds; Esc cancels. Bindings save on this device and apply immediately.

Appearance

Applies to the Projects, Clients and Plant library screens. The design studio stays dark so drawings read against it.

New sheet

Every sheet draws from the same site model — plants and shapes live once. A sheet keeps its own layers (eye · print · lock), extent, scale and title.

Phasing — implementation phases

Split the proposed work into phases. Pick a strategy to assign every proposed element at once, then rename, reorder or retag anything; or build the phases by hand. Existing conditions (boundary, contours, the house, existing plants, detected paving) are never phased.

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